1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to technology for computer-based rearrangement of a musical composition.
2. Description of Related Art
It is often desirable to add music to a piece of video or film to enhance the mood or impact experienced by the viewer. In high budget productions music is composed specifically for the film, but in some cases the producer or editor will want to use an existing piece of music. Libraries of “Production Music” are available for this purpose with a broad range of music genres and lower licensing costs than commercially released music.
An existing piece of music is unlikely to have the same length as the film scenes it is set to, so either the film is edited to fit the music or more commonly the music is edited to fit the film. Making manual edits in the middle of a piece of music often gives unsatisfactory results, so usually the editor will select a section of the music with the wanted length and apply a cut or fade at the ends of the section.
The editor may wish to select a quiet or unobtrusive part of the music, or a loud dynamic part depending on the wanted effect. Some professional music libraries offer music in “stem” format where instead of a single stereo recording there are separate recordings of (for example) vocals, drums, bass and other accompaniment and the editor can combine or omit each stem as desired. Or there may be multiple versions to choose from, such as “full mix”, “mix with no vocals” or “mix with no drums”. However it requires additional work by the editor to utilize the music in stem form and additional resources to handle the increased amount of data and number of simultaneous audio tracks.
Technologies have been developed for composing music with a given length, or compiling pre-existing sections of music to a given length but these cannot be applied to large existing libraries of music without musical knowledge and a great deal of manual preparation and editing.